triage

A prioritization engine for plain-text tasks. It scores your tasks with ICE or RICE, resolves dependencies to show what is actually unblocked right now, and builds a daily plan that fits the time you have. Your tasks are markdown lines you own and can grep, sync, or keep in git. No dependencies, no AI.

A todo list tells you what exists. triage tells you what to do next, and why.

Install

npm install -g @bobfromarcher/triage

How it works

A task is one markdown line with inline metadata:

- [ ] Ship login page #frontend ice:9/7/5 est:3h needs:t1 id:t2

You add tasks, score the ones that matter, and triage does the ranking and planning.

# quote the whole task so your shell keeps the #tags
triage add "Design auth API #backend ice:8/8/6 est:2h id:t1"
triage add "Build login page #frontend ice:9/7/5 est:3h needs:t1"

triage                  # ranked list of what is actionable now
triage blocked          # what is waiting, and on what
triage plan --time 3h   # the best set of tasks that fits 3 hours
triage done t1          # finishing t1 unblocks anything that needed it

Metadata

| Token | Meaning | | --- | --- | | #tag | Project or area, repeatable | | ice:I/C/E | Impact, Confidence, Ease, each 1 to 10. Score is I * C * E | | rice:R/I/C/E | Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. Score is R * I * C / E | | est:2h, est:90m | Time estimate | | due:YYYY-MM-DD | Due date, used as a tiebreaker | | needs:id1,id2 | Dependencies. The task stays blocked until those ids are done | | id:tN | A stable id. One is assigned automatically if you omit it |

Pick one scoring method per list. ICE and RICE produce numbers on different scales, so mixing them in the same list makes the ranking hard to read.

Commands

| Command | What it does | | --- | --- | | triage | Top unblocked tasks, ranked | | triage add "<text>" | Add a task | | triage done <id> | Mark a task done and stamp the date | | triage ls [--all] [--tag t] | List open tasks, or all | | triage blocked | Tasks waiting on dependencies | | triage plan --time <budget> | A plan that fits the time, for example 3h or 90m | | triage stats | Open and done counts, open work remaining, throughput over the last 7 days | | triage where | Print the task file path |

Every read command also takes --json.

The plan

triage plan walks your unblocked tasks from highest score down and packs the ones that fit the budget, skipping anything that would run over. It is a fast, deterministic answer to "what is the best use of the next three hours."

Where it lives

Tasks are stored in ~/.triage/tasks.md (override with TRIAGE_FILE). It is a plain markdown file that triage owns, so keep it in a git repo or a synced folder and your task list follows you between machines.

Development

git clone https://github.com/bobfromarcher/triage
cd triage
node test/test.js

Parsing, scoring, dependency resolution and the planner are pure functions, tested without touching the filesystem. CI runs on Node 18, 20 and 22 across Linux, macOS and Windows.

License

MIT, bobfromarcher.